You may have noticed that the Gigapan pano's shown on the front page of gigapan.org are curated by us. Several have asked what can improve the chances that panoramas make it into this selected set and the answer is easy: upload a great panorama, be sure to write some descriptive text about it, and take some snapshots inside it. Those are all key to getting your panorama curated to the front page. We have been curating sets of panoramas, anywhere from four to twenty at a time, and when you go to gigapan.org's home page you are shown one at random. I hope you enjoy the variation on the front page.

We love seeing websites begin to incorporate Gigapan explorability into their presentations, and a number of news organizations have begun doing this. One fun, new scientific foray is involved with the work of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. Here is their embedded Gigapan page:

The Gigapan development team has released private Gigapan features which make it possible for authors of uploaded Gigapan panoramas to easily make their panoramas private. Also, the author can then share the Gigapan pano with anyone by emailing them the URL when they log in and access the private panorama. Gigapan.org is all about sharing and exploration, so we hope you use this feature wisely and sparingly. One great way to use 'private' is to upload your Gigapan pano as private, add your commentary, snapshots and geolocation, then make it public with all the i's dotted and t's crossed.

The way we have calculated the Explore Score score for the past year has depended on the volume of visits to each Gigapan panorama over the life of our one-year-old website, and this method makes it hard for new Gigapan panoramas to obtain high scores without being in a major periodical (like Sports Illustrated, in the case of the Yankee Stadium high-scorer).

Explore Score is now a totally new value that takes into account not just volumes of visitors, but how richly the panorama has been annotated and the degree to which it is a subject of conversations. In a way, it is a measure of how “explorable” we believe the image to be. As with all scoring algorithms, you are going to see some of your favorite panoramas rise and others fall based on this new scoring methodology. We hope you will agree that, on balance, this change turns out to be an improvement in scoring true explorability and in giving new panoramas a better chance.

Welcome to the GigaPan blog. We intend to use this venue to make you aware of feature additions and changes on the GigaPan website and to provide you with more information on the status of retail sales of the GigaPan camera system. There is also a great deal of outreach activities employing the GigaPan technology all over the world, from schoolchildren documenting their neighborhood identity to internationally recognized scientists documenting biodiversity. This will also be a great vehicle for telling you about some of these programs and the GigaPan gallery shows coming up that will showcase all sorts of Gigapanners. On this last note, Robot 250 just came to an end. At www.robot250.org click on “Media” for a gallery of images, some taken in the GigaPan gallery that we set up at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA as part of this event. There was even an interactive kiosk with three trackballs in this gallery that enabled museum visitors to explore Gigapan panoramas.

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Gigapan inspires and connects the world by empowering people to experience, create, store, share and monetize remarkable HD imagery by providing an ecosystem of hardware, software, viewers and developer tools.